The electric vehicle market continues to grow around the world, despite what many would have you think. In fact, even in the United States, the large auto market with the weakest EV policies (well, compared to China and Europe), electric vehicles see their sales increasing year after year. In the second quarter of 2024, compared to the second quarter of 2023, sales of 100% electric vehicles increased by 16% in the US.
Yes, if you compare to Q2 2022, you can see that sales increased much more from 2022 to 2023, but BEV sales still grew by a notable 16% in 2024. The 86% growth from Q2 2022 to Q2 2024 should be looked at as a whole, too. That’s nearly a doubling of sales in two years.
In volume terms, you can see from the next chart that 46,000 more electric vehicles were sold in Q2 2024 than in Q2 2023. And going back to Q2 2022, you can see that the quarterly sales had increased by 156,000.
That’s growth. The issue raised by various automakers is the growth isn’t strong enough, but even that is a little deceiving. The biggest growth hit is at Tesla, which accounts for about half of the US EV market. As you can see in this third chart, below, Tesla sales dropped year over year in Q2, whereas non-Tesla BEV sales continued growing strongly. The narrative that EV sales are not growing fast basically breaks down if you take Tesla out of the equation.
An e bike if you can use one in your situation is probably way better for the environment than replacing a vehicle. It is energy intensive to wheel around two tons of steel and rubber to transport one human from point a to b, even if BEVs do it much more efficiently and cleanly than internal combustion vehicles do.
I wish we had more places in the US where it made sense to replace a vehicle with a cargo e bike